About this Book

Book Summary

A family founders after a mother's death in this beautifully
observed debut.
Cheryl Strayed has a deep appreciation for the shifting rhythms
between siblings and parents and for the beautiful terrors of
learning how to keep living. The wonderful characters in Torch come
alive and stay with you long after the novel ends.

"Be incredible!" That's the advice Teresa Rae Wood gives the
listeners of her popular local radio show, Modern Pioneers!, a kind
of hippie Praire Home Companion. Teresa has taken the advice to
heart in her own life. As a teen mother and abused wife, she escaped
with her two children to rural Minnesota, fell in love with a local
carpenter, and raised good kids, Claire and Joshua. Then, at only
38, she receives the devastating news that she is gravely ill. In
just a few weeks, she is gone.

The award-winning writer Cheryl Strayed creates from this
shattering experience a novel that reviewers have called "an
unforgettable read" and "a hauntingly beautiful story" that
"shimmers with a humane grace."

Infused with compassion and surprising humor, Torch takes a
refreshingly unsentimental view of a family reeling from crisis.
Claire drops out of college to devote herself to keeping her
mother's memory alive back home. Joshua drifts out of high school
and into trouble, keeping his grief silently private. Suddenly
thrown into adulthood, they struggle to figure out how to connect in
this new, unthinkable situation. Their one remaining ballast is
Teresa's gentle common-law husband, Bruce. When Bruce announces news
of his own plans, it comes as a shock not only to Claire and Joshua
but also to the townspeople who have watched this unusual family
grow and have come to love them.

Cheryl Strayed has a deep appreciation for the shifting rhythms
between siblings and parents and for the beautiful terrors of
learning how to keep living. The wonderful characters in Torch come
alive and stay with you long after the novel ends.

1

She ached. As if her spine were a zipper and someone had come up behind
her and unzipped it and pushed his hands into her organs and squeezed, as
if they were butter or dough, or grapes to be smashed for wine. At other
times it was something sharp like diamonds or shards of glass engraving her
bones. Teresa explained these sensations to the doctor the zipper, the
grapes, the diamonds, and the glasswhile he sat on his little stool with
wheels and wrote in a notebook. He continued to write after she'd stopped
speaking, his head cocked and still like a dog listening to a sound that was
distinct, but far off. It was late afternoon, the end of a long day of tests, and
he was the final doctor, the real doctor, the one who would tell her at last
what was wrong.

Teresa held her earrings in the palm of one handdried violets
pressed between tiny panes of glassand put them on, still getting dressed
after hours of going from one room to the ...

Reviews

Media Reviews

First--novelist Strayed shows a deep appreciation for the rhythms of small-town life, capturing the sense of community, the struggle to earn a living, and also the disdain for "city apes."

Publishers Weekly

Strayed's characters are real and lovable, even as they fail themselves and each other; even tertiary players feel fully realized. Though the subject is sad, the novel is not without humor; it shimmers with a humane grace.

Library Journal - Joy Humphrey

Starred Review. Strayed's descriptions of her characters' lives, where and how they live, what they remember, and what they wish to forget ring true and clear and make this novel an unforgettable read; highly recommended.

Kirkus Reviews

Starred Review. A hauntingly beautiful story written with tenderness and endowed with true insights into the frailty of relationships.

Ursula Hegi
In language that's lyrical and haunting, Cheryl Strayed writes about bliss and loss, about the kind of grace that startles and transforms us in ordinary moments.

Elizabeth BergTorch is a deeply compelling, wonderfully crafted story about a journey into, through, and past grief . . . I loved the honesty of this novel, the way it looked at every aspect of loss and recovery -- the pain, the joy, the absurdity, the anger, the despair, the hope, and the great beauty -- without ever holding back.

Susan Richards Shreve
We know these characters so well and with such intricate understanding that their lives belong to us in a way that is the rare gift of fiction and a particular triumph of Strayed's wise and beautiful novel.

George Saunders
Big-hearted, keen-eyed, lyrical, precise, possessed of a genuine love for her characters, Strayed reminds us in every line that if defeat and despair are part of human experience, so are kindness, patience, and transcendence. This book is a wonderful and heartening accomplishment.

Beyond the Book

Born in western
Pennsylvania in 1968, Strayed spent
most of her formative yearsfrom the
age of five until her
mid-twentiesin Minnesota. Torch
takes place in the fictional town of
Midden, Minnesota, based on her
hometown of McGregor. "It's my
literary landscape; my spiritual
home," she says. "No matter how far
I wander, I often travel back to
Minnesota when I sit down to write."

Before turning to her first novel, Strayed wrote a number of essays, one of which is titled "Heroin/e" and was
included in Best American Essays
(2000). It tells ...

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